Jake

Idle Thumbs 226: "Console Wars and Hedge Dog" or "The New Far Cry 2"

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Rich Uncle, Cool Uncle...

 

Strange Uncle?!

 

 

MGS V looks intriguing to me in a way that no other Metal Gears Solid have ever done. I'm excited kind of in the way Jake was excited upon hearing about it. I was just gifted Ground Zeroes, going to try that out. If I like it... is MGS V for me even though I don't care at all about Metal Gear or Plasma Snake or Gundam Hippo or whatever the hell the characters are named?

 

This thread has also taught me that it's in fact Neon Genesis and not Neo.

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I read this, and imagined that whilst typing, Jake was taken by the robots and then immediately replaced by a robo simulacrum.

Sorry that was an iPhone autocorrect explosion. Nothing to worry about. I am Jacob Rodkin.

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This conversation is the only one I've heard about MGS V that has me interested in actually playing it. Only game of the series I've played is AC!D 2 and while I've enjoyed hearing about things from the main entries (psycho mantis reading memory card, playing a different character in Solid 2, Chris' experience with the ladder in ... 4?) I've never been intrigued enough to try it out. Comparing it to Far Cry 2 kind of sold me.

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Something about the MGS series has always just made my shy away from it. The stories about ground zeroes didn't help either.

 

The series just seems like a complete mess tone- and plot-wise. I'm intrigued by the FC2 comparison (who isn't?), but I can't convert that into putting up $100 to buy it. That said, this is coming from someone who has never played a single entry in the series, yet bought MGS4.

 

Maybe if the feminist cabal stream some of it I might finally understand what's going on.

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Sorry that was an iPhone autocorrect explosion. Nothing to worry about. I am Jacob Rodkin.

 

...What day was it yesterday?

 

 

 

I haven't heard the resolution to that robot caller story that was hinted at this week. My mind is racing with theories!

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This is the first time a discussion of the MGS series hasn't left me feeling like a total alien. As if no one has ever noticed or has always just gone along with the

- a lack of self-editing (or any sense of internal consistency or thematic adhesion)

- middle-grade-level book-report literary / religious references

- college common-room ramblings on the philosophy of war

- piss jokes

- bikini snipers

which all adds up to: tone-deaf tonal insanity

 

Instead of seeming smart, it just seems schizophrenic. I would be willing to get on board with some of the philosophical jams if maybe the game didn't pretend there weren't something super weird about a bikini sniper, especially considering the game's focus on tactical minutiae. And I'd be on board with the bikini sniper if Kojima didn't seem so superficial and sleazy about it.

 

I felt like the only sane person in a world where everyone's drank the Kojima Brand™ Kool-Aid™ and here you guys are providing a safe place to meet and chat

 

And then you go and compare it to Far Cry 2 and whoops I one-click ordered it from Amazon. And I didn't even have one-click enabled. I enabled one-click just to order that game. Click!

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This is the first time a discussion of the MGS series hasn't left me feeling like a total alien. As if no one has ever noticed or has always just gone along with the

- a lack of self-editing (or any sense of internal consistency or thematic adhesion)

- middle-grade-level book-report literary / religious references

- college common-room ramblings on the philosophy of war

- piss jokes

- bikini snipers

which all adds up to: tone-deaf tonal insanity

Instead of seeming smart, it just seems schizophrenic. I would be willing to get on board with some of the philosophical jams if maybe the game didn't pretend there weren't something super weird about a bikini sniper, especially considering the game's focus on tactical minutiae. And I'd be on board with the bikini sniper if Kojima didn't seem so superficial and sleazy about it.

I felt like the only sane person in a world where everyone's drank the Kojima Brand™ Kool-Aid™ and here you guys are providing a safe place to meet and chat

And then you go and compare it to Far Cry 2 and whoops I one-click ordered it from Amazon. And I didn't even have one-click enabled. I enabled one-click just to order that game. Click!

Life can be confusing.

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It's a little bit weird that anime is being used so broadly to explain everything that doesn't really work thematically in the new Metal Gear Solid. I mean, I'm not surprised that two types of work originating from the same culture share some common ground (and common weaknesses), but I don't know about relying on generalizations about a massive medium, especially typified by a singular work like Neon Genesis Evangelion, to explain so many of the weird, inconsistent, or disappointing parts of a single work from a different medium, mostly because they share that culture.

 

Honestly, I'd rather venture that NGE and MGS feel so similar in places is because they're both made by intellectual and eccentric Japanese auteurs with a love of military hardware and science fiction who were born in the early 1960s, not "lol anime" or whatever.

 

I do agree a lot with you.

 

Kojima appear to have a huge fascination with cinema and I wonder how much of what he does and style came from there, specially from the very Japanese cinema, which certain genres often use lots of stylish and surrealism. To be fair, I just remembered about old Yakuza movie I watched long ago in a Japanese Culture class - the movie in case is Tokyo Nagaremono (1966, a.k.a Tokyo Drifter but not that other Tokyo Drifter movie) a very stylish and almost absurd movie, much to the despair of Nikkatsu (the producers of the movie) how tried to cut the directors funds (Seiju Suzuki) to see if he tones down a bit, but had the oppositive effect, as he made the movie even more weird, something which kind remind of Konami and Kojima thing.

My contact with MGS is very recent with the steam release: Revengence, which by the way, is a amazing game (and the one you can say, yeah it´s "lol anime" and mean it, but in a good way) when I had the battle with Mistral, I loved who she has her own theme song with lyrics, which made the fighting really cool. Kind wish more game use songs with lyrics (and I mean lyrics tied to the game) in actions scenes. I played a bit o Ground Zeros, but I am not very good at stealth games, which made me decide to maybe buy MGSV later (also Nobunaga´s Ambition was released in the same day), since I am not sure that I would be able to really enjoy it. Specially since while I managed to do the main mission in Ground Zeros, I am stuck doing the other ones.

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MGS V looks intriguing to me in a way that no other Metal Gears Solid have ever done. I'm excited kind of in the way Jake was excited upon hearing about it. I was just gifted Ground Zeroes, going to try that out. If I like it... is MGS V for me even though I don't care at all about Metal Gear or Plasma Snake or Gundam Hippo or whatever the hell the characters are named?

 

Ground Zeroes has MGS V's basic movement and shooting mechanics, but almost none of the dense systemic stuff that earns a comparison to Far Cry 2, since you're confined to a single military base to perform a 90 minute long mission. In a world where Konami wasn't bleeding cash making the proper game, it would've been the demo.

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Very good point! Bad on me for generalizing something not localized strictly to Japanese media. I'm sure it's easy to find several examples across modern stories where you can tell the author only sorta understood what they were inspired by. For example, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is a game I love but its use of the Journey to the West story pretty much just takes the iconic images and very basic framework of the story. 

 

No worries, I'm not trying to call people out, least of all any specific person. It's just a bit too easy for almost anyone to talk about anime as a monolith composed of EvangelionCowboy Bebop, and Attack on Titan, along with lesser imitators. Yeah, those are the shows that have made the biggest impact in the States, much like Transformers and The Avengers probably look like the sum total of American movie-making to the rest of the world, and they similarly make anime look like an over-the-top, tonally inconsistent, and thematically shallow medium. Of course, my personal feelings about Evangelion's effectiveness as actual art aside, that's just because the popular palette hasn't really made a space yet for quieter "healing" anime like Haibane Renmei or clever literary adaptations like Gankutsuou — not to mention that runaway successes like Miyazaki and Satoshi Kon just get divested of their foreignness and incorporated into the landscape of American cinema wholesale. It's just a literacy problem, like games had back in the nineties about being wish-fulfillment murder simulators, but with the added barrier of language, and shortcuts that oversell anime's wackiness abound. I use them all the time, because it's what's different about anime, even if not necessarily good.

 

Also, I totally agree with a lot of what you said about literary cred being pasted onto non-literary media through pointless or shallow allusions. There's a certain "breathed upon" nature of such allusions that seems to satisfy creators and audiences alike with its faux-depth. Nowadays, when I watch movies or games, I try to remember or write down the opening quote, just to make sure that the work follows through with it at least a little.

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This is the first time a discussion of the MGS series hasn't left me feeling like a total alien. As if no one has ever noticed or has always just gone along with the

- a lack of self-editing (or any sense of internal consistency or thematic adhesion)

- middle-grade-level book-report literary / religious references

- college common-room ramblings on the philosophy of war

- piss jokes

- bikini snipers

which all adds up to: tone-deaf tonal insanity

 

Instead of seeming smart, it just seems schizophrenic. I would be willing to get on board with some of the philosophical jams if maybe the game didn't pretend there weren't something super weird about a bikini sniper, especially considering the game's focus on tactical minutiae. And I'd be on board with the bikini sniper if Kojima didn't seem so superficial and sleazy about it.

 

I felt like the only sane person in a world where everyone's drank the Kojima Brand™ Kool-Aid™ and here you guys are providing a safe place to meet and chat

 

And then you go and compare it to Far Cry 2 and whoops I one-click ordered it from Amazon. And I didn't even have one-click enabled. I enabled one-click just to order that game. Click!

Metal Gear Solid was a great game up and down. A few dips here and there, but amazing. Whatever jokes there are here and there were acceptable because they weren't staples of a director's shtick. It was over-dramatic at times, it was full of exposition and lectures, but it was thematically and emotionally stable throughout the whole game.

 

And then the series was downhill for me at that point. The Twin Snakes remake is just the perfect example of 'jumping the shark,' or like... Just imagine if George Lucas said, "I'm remaking the original trilogy" before he quit Star Wars, and all his awful habits and lack of talent and imagination barfed out a mess that resembled but ruined something that was otherwise 'perfect.' The amount of John Woo introduced into things really killed it. I know MGS was full of crazy unreal things (Psycho Mantis, some of Vulcan Raven's bullshit), but it wasn't slapped all over, and not everyone was a super-hero-ninja-double-spy.

 

MGS3 stands out as alright because, though it is long-winded, it gives some background on what motivates Big Boss. Though the series after that puts a giant boot-stomp on the face of MGS3 to heavy-handedly enforce things that were otherwise abstract or easy to make guesses on a guided path.

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Yeah, remember that Twin Snakes was a Silicon Knights project. I'm not saying Denis Dyack was responsible for all its failings, but where there's smoke, there's fire, y'know?

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Yeah, remember that Twin Snakes was a Silicon Knights project. I'm not saying Denis Dyack was responsible for all its failings, but where there's smoke, there's fire, y'know?

I forgot about that, yeah. Still, it does fall into step almost perfectly with Kojima's stuff anyway.

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Twin Snakes is the better MGS1. It's kind of crazy how many people dislike it.

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I feel a few people have mostly covered why using a whole art form as a shorthand for anything is probably a bad idea, however........maybe there's something to it?

 

First things first, I've never played any of the MGS series so I make all these assumption about what it's supposed "animeness" is from a place of ignorance but, from what people are saying here and what I've read before about it, the things it seems to share with quite a few anime is that they can have have rapid changes in tone, tend to value the iconic over the realistic, & like to push and occasionally break the 4th wall.

 

I think I've seen more characters break the fourth wall in animation than any other medium by a country mile. I feel like it must be because there's already a baseline awareness of the artifice of the world present in the audience of a animation that isn't necessarily as present in other narrative mediums.

So breaking that artifice of the world with a incredibly over the top character design, or making a stupid joke which totally doesn't fit the tone, or turning to wink/talk directly to the audience doesn't feel as jarring because  the audience has already accepted the world as artificial.

 

Perhaps someone like Kojima brought up in a culture where the acknowledgement of the artifice involved in media might be more common could be instinctively less precious about the artifice in games than a load of us who were raised on the idea that immersion is this fragile thing we should strive never to break.

 

That or it's just all about the damn giant  Mecha :P

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Yes so much this! I have always been annoyed with the sloppy application of literature and/or philosophy in Japanese games. "feels like someone giving a book report without having read the book" is a great definition of this.

 

To be fair, I imagine most American games that use Ninjas and other bits of Japanese culture and mythology probably feel the same way to someone in Japan.

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Also, I'm currently playing through MGS2. That game feels incredibly self-aware. I don't know if that changes in 3 or 4 or 5 (since I've never played past 2), but from some of the stories I've heard (on this episode of the 'cast, and elsewhere), it sounds like the games continue down that track. Codi describes pretty well, too, the rapidly changing tone that's inherent to the series.

 

I don't think (know?) that any of the following has been happening in this thread, but it's a fairly common to see or hear:

 

It's always struck me as a bit off-target to accuse Kojima of being too full of himself, taking his fiction far too seriously. I'm sure there's an element of that in his direction, but I mean in one sentence Campbell is telling me to go to some destination, and in the next, he's, fully in character!, telling me exactly which button to press to flip over a rail. At no point is the player unaware that he or she is playing a video game. Not much longer after that, one of the bosses is in a cutscene talking about how she saw someone hiding under a box on a bridge. Everyone knows what she's talking about, even though she never mentions Snake by name, because that was a mechanic in the first game (and the second game up to that point), so that's a nice wink to the camera.

 

I dunno. I've got a coworker who looooves to hate Metal Gear Solid. His excuse is that the MGS fans are unbearable and never stop praising the story, but honestly, he's spent more energy angrily ranting about the story of the MGS series than anyone I've ever talked to has spent gushing about how fun the games are.

 

I'm not sure how I ended up here in this post. MGS is weird. I like MGS.

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Twin Snakes is weird because Kojima seems to have separated himself from it either because of the Silicon Knight relationship or just regrets on letting another person handle it. Kojima himself had another director (Ryuhei Kitamura) hired to spice up the cutscenes: http://thesnakesoup.org/myth-articles/myth-silicon-knights-fucked-up-the-cutscenes-in-the-twin-snakes/ Other than the difference between some of the cutscenes I think Twin Snakes is superiror, most of the dialogue is the exact same, voice actors do a better job this time, graphics are better, gameplay is in line with MGS2.

 

But Kojima also passed the buck when it came to Portable Ops' story later on even though it would appear it was supposed to be canon for it's included references into MGS4 cutscene. I've also heard both ways that while the game was mostly written by others, Kojima was responsible for the terrible Grey Fox retcon.

 

In short, I have a hard time trusting anything Kojima says. My words and deeds.

 

Yes so much this! I have always been annoyed with the sloppy application of literature and/or philosophy in Japanese games. "feels like someone giving a book report without having read the book" is a great definition of this.

Yeah I agree, this stuff in general is something I find to be a problem with Japanese writing as a whole, not just Metal Gear Solid. It's not always a bad thing but often times it can seem hokey, especially when they wait to bring this sort of hamfisted philosophy in right at the end of the story and risk ruining everything before. I imagine it's just different sensibilities.

 

I also chalk up the lingering shots to Japanese director sensibilities as well, since I've noticed they are much bigger on holds for shots concerning character emotions than directors in the United States. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but as a shitty ADD American I get impatient often. The briefing stuff in MGS4 was horribly painful. This is one reason I like that starting with Peacewalker Metal Gear moved the bulk of of the codecs and backstory to the tape system so that I can listen to them like a podcast or radio play while I do something else.

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Yeah I agree, this stuff in general is something I find to be a problem with Japanese writing as a whole, not just Metal Gear Solid. It's not always a bad thing but often times it can seem hokey, especially when they wait to bring this sort of hamfisted philosophy in right at the end of the story and risk ruining everything before. I imagine it's just different sensibilities.

 

But, I think this is actually just the rare time when Americans experience this phenomena, while the rest of the world has to deal with our culture doing it to everyone else all the time (see every incorporation of history, religion, philosophy, ethnic stereotypes, geography, etc in video games and movies).  That doesn't mean that it isn't a valid criticism or observation of Japanese creators/anime/MGS, but I do find it a bit odd the weight that it's given as a criticism when it appears to be pretty universal.

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Yeah, sorry I am not articulating it right and don't mean to be so eurocentrist. I guess it's not fair to be so critical since a lot of my favorite animated works are Japanese and employ this tactic, usually being the reason I fall in love with in.

 

I imagine even the weird Link's Awakening ending I love is a part of this need for reflection.

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To be fair, I imagine most American games that use Ninjas and other bits of Japanese culture and mythology probably feel the same way to someone in Japan.

If you hear the word "Ronin" in American-based fiction of any sort just head for the hills.

 

Edit - Actually one time I can remember it being used legit was from Venture Bros. when #21 remarks on the loss of the Monarch as their leader.

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I'm going to float this out there as just a silly thought, but could the whole ham-fisted mish-mash of religions & philosophy we perceive in a lot of Japanese stuff be because it has a long history of Polytheism? (as opposed to western Monotheism) and if so people could maybe be more open to the idea of taking different things from different belief systems and combining them??

 

(someone who has a lot better knowledge of Japanese religion & Shintoism in particular than i do probably has a much clearer idea if thats true or not)

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I'm going to float this out there as just a silly thought, but could the whole ham-fisted mish-mash of religions & philosophy we perceive in a lot of Japanese stuff be because it has a long history of Polytheism? (as opposed to western Monotheism) and if so people could maybe be more open to the idea of taking different things from different belief systems and combining them??

(someone who has a lot better knowledge of Japanese religion & Shintoism in particular than i do probably has a much clearer idea if thats true or not)

Something like this? https://ogiuemaniax.wordpress.com/2015/04/21/jesus-is-kind-of-like-a-buddha-right/

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